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An Anonymous Coward writes:

KDE's Telemetry: The Tip Of The Iceberg?:

Recently, there was a debate on the PCLinuxOS forum about KDE Plasma's implementation of telemetry through KUserFeedback. While in PCLinuxOS, we can remove it without any collateral effects to the system, while other users reported that doing the same in other distros (like Debian 11) results in the complete removal of KDE Plasma! Why force such an implementation, if, as KDE's developers say, it is just an innocuous, privacy-respecting measure?

Coincidence or not, in the past years many popular Linux distributions started rolling out optional telemetry. Then it was the time of computer programs: news broke out in May regarding Audacity, a popular audio editing app, which announced it was starting the use of telemetry. The move was finally pushed back after users revolted against it.

While many point out that the data collection is by opt-in and entirely anonymous, others have found that, even if you don't activate telemetry, data is still collected, using computer resources, registering "apps and boot, number of times used and duration in /home/user/telemetry folder." As such, they argue that, because of the way Linux permissions work, other programs could have access to these log files. KUserFeedback's FAQs page confirms this:

"KUserFeedback is designed to be compliant with KDE Telemetry Policy, which forbids the usage of unique identification. If you are using KUserFeedback outside of the scope of that policy, it's of course possible to add a custom data source generating and transmitting a unique id."

Do any Soylentils have opinions about this, or experiences with it?

Original Submission

NPC-131072 writes:

Smartphone Sensor Data Has Potential to Detect Cannabis Intoxication:

A smartphone sensor, much like what is used in GPS systems, might be a way to determine whether or not someone is intoxicated after consuming marijuana, according to a new study by the Rutgers Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research.

According to the study, published in Drug and Alcohol Dependence, which evaluated the feasibility of using smartphone sensor data to identify episodes of cannabis intoxication in the natural environment, a combination of time features (tracking the time of day and day of week) and smartphone sensor data had a 90 percent rate of accuracy.

[...] Cannabis intoxication has been associated with slowed response time, affecting performance at work or school or impairing driving behavior leading to injuries or fatalities. Existing detection measures, such as blood, urine or saliva tests, have limitations as indicators of cannabis intoxication and cannabis-related impairment in daily life.

Journal Reference:
Sang Won Bae, Tammy Chung, Rahul Islama, et al. Mobile phone sensor-based detection of subjective cannabis intoxication in young adults: A feasibility study in real-world settings, Drug and Alcohol Dependence (DOI: 10.1016/j.drugalcdep.2021.108972)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Mozilla Says Chrome’s Latest Feature Enables Surveillance:

Chrome 94 has officially dropped. As is always the case with a new browser version, there’s plenty to be excited about. However, there are also some items to be skeptical about, including a feature Mozilla claims enables surveillance on you.

[...] Chrome 94 introduces a controversial idle detection API. Basically, websites can ask Chrome to report when a user with a web page open is idle on their device. It’s not just about your usage of Chrome or a particular website: If you’ve stepped away from your computer and aren’t using any applications, Chrome can tell the website you’re not actively using your computer.

As you might expect, developers love this new feature—anything that can provide them with more information regarding how users are interacting with their apps is a positive. It’s enabled by default in Chrome 94, but it might not be as bad as it sounds. Like using your webcam or microphone, a prompt will ask your permission before using your idle data on a particular website.

The API comes with its fair share of opponents, including rival browser-maker Mozilla. The folks behind Firefox say that it creates an “opportunity for surveillance capitalism.” Mozilla’s Web Standards Lead Tantek Çelik commented on GitHub, saying:

AnonTechie writes:

Why OpenAI’s Codex Won’t Replace Coders:

This summer, the artificial intelligence company OpenAI released Codex, a new system that automatically writes software code using only simple prompts written in plain language. Codex is based on GPT-3, a revolutionary deep learning platform that OpenAI trained on nearly all publicly available written text on the Internet through 2019.

As an early Beta tester, I've had extensive opportunities to put both GPT-3 and Codex through their paces. The most frequent question I'm asked about Codex is "Will this replace human programmers?" With world powers like the United States investing billions into training new software developers, it's natural to worry that all the effort and money could be for naught.

If you're a software developer yourself—or your company has spent tons of money hiring them—you can breathe easy. Codex won't replace human developers any time soon, though it may make them far more powerful, efficient, and focused.

Why isn't Codex an existential threat to human developers? Years ago, I worked with a high-level (and highly compensated) data scientist and software developer from a major American consulting firm on a government database project. Our task was to understand how a state agency was using its database to assign grants to organizations, and then to advise the agency on how to improve the database.

upstart writes:

Apple Pay with VISA lets hackers force payments on locked iPhones:

Express Transit works for specific services, like ticket gates, with card readers that send a non-standard sequence of bytes that bypass the Apple Pay lock screen.

In combination with a Visa card, “this feature can be leveraged to bypass the Apple Pay lock screen, and illicitly pay from a locked iPhone, using a Visa card, to any EMV reader, for any amount, without user authorisation.”

The researchers were able to emulate a ticket-barrier transaction by using a Proxmark device acting as a card reader communicating with the target iPhone and an Android phone with an NFC chip that communicated with a payment terminal.

[...] “The attack works by first replaying the Magic Bytes to the iPhone, such that it believes the transaction is happening with a transport EMV reader. Secondly, while relaying the EMV messages, the Terminal Transaction Qualifiers (TTQ), sent by the EMV terminal, need to be modified such that the bits (flags) for Offline Data Authentication (ODA) for Online Authorizations supported and EMV mode supported are set.”

[...] Digging deeper into the issue, the researcher discovered that they could modify the Card Transaction Qualifiers (CTQ) responsible for setting contactless transactions limits.

This modification is to trick the card reader that the authentication step on the mobile device has been completed successfully. During the experiment, the researchers were able to make a GBP 1,000 transaction from a locked iPhone. They tested the attack successfully on iPhone 7 and iPhone 12.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Clover growth in Mars-like soils boosted by bacterial symbiosis:

As Earth's population grows, researchers are studying the possibility of farming Martian soils, or "regolith." However, regolith is lacking in some essential plant nutrients, including certain nitrogen-containing molecules that plants require to live. Therefore, agriculture on Mars will require strategies to increase the amount of these nitrogen compounds in regolith.

[...] To explore a possible role for symbiotic nitrogen-fixing bacteria in astroagriculture, the researchers grew clover in man-made regolith that closely matches that of Mars. They inoculated some of the plants with the microbe Sinorhizobium meliloti, which is commonly found in clover root nodules on Earth.

[...] The researchers found that the inoculated clover experienced 75% more root and shoot growth compared to the uninoculated clover.

[...] These findings suggest the possibility that symbiosis between plants and nitrogen-fixing bacteria could aid agriculture on Mars. Future research could continue to explore such relationships with other crops and address issues with plant toxicity in regolith.

Journal Reference:
Franklin Harris, John Dobbs, David Atkins, et al. Soil fertility interactions with Sinorhizobium-legume symbiosis in a simulated Martian regolith; effects on nitrogen content and plant health, PLOS ONE (DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0257053)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

AMD wants to make its chips 30 times more energy-efficient by 2025

Today, [AMD] announced its most ambitious goal yet—to increase the energy efficiency of its Epyc CPUs and Instinct AI accelerators 30 times by 2025. This would help data centers and supercomputers achieve high performance with significant power savings over current solutions.

If it achieves this goal, the savings would add up to billions of kilowatt-hours of electricity saved in 2025 alone, meaning the power required to perform a single calculation in high-performance computing tasks will have decreased by 97 percent.

Increasing energy efficiency this much will involve a lot of engineering wizardry, including AMD's stacked 3D V-Cache chiplet technology. The company acknowledges the difficult task ahead of it, now that "energy-efficiency gains from process node advances are smaller and less frequent."

What does it mean?

In addition to compute node performance/Watt measurements, to make the goal particularly relevant to worldwide energy use, AMD uses segment-specific datacenter power utilization effectiveness (PUE) with equipment utilization taken into account. The energy consumption baseline uses the same industry energy per operation improvement rates as from 2015-2020, extrapolated to 2025. The measure of energy per operation improvement in each segment from 2020-2025 is weighted by the projected worldwide volumes multiplied by the Typical Energy Consumption (TEC) of each computing segment to arrive at a meaningful metric of actual energy usage improvement worldwide.

See the 25x20 Initiative from a few years ago.

See also: NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang to unveil new AI technologies and products at GTC Keynote in November

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

Researchers use Starlink satellites to pinpoint location, similar to GPS:

Researchers track six satellites to get location with accuracy of eight meters.

Signals from SpaceX Starlink broadband satellites can be used to pinpoint locations on Earth to within eight meters of accuracy, engineering researchers reported in a new peer-reviewed paper. Their report is part of a growing body of research into using signals from low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellites for navigation, similar to how GPS works.

Kassas said his "team has used similar techniques with other low-Earth orbit satellite constellations, but with less accuracy, pinpointing locations within about 23 meters," according to the Ohio State News article.

SpaceX satellite signals used like GPS to pinpoint location on Earth

Researchers find novel way to use Starlink system

Engineering researchers have developed a method to use signals broadcast by Starlink internet service satellites to accurately locate a position here on Earth, much like GPS does. It is the first time the Starlink system has been harnessed by researchers outside SpaceX for navigation.

[....] Their findings, shared today (Sept. 22, 2021) at the Institute of Navigation GNSS annual meeting in St. Louis, may provide a promising alternative to GPS. Their results will be published in the upcoming issue of the journal IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems.

The researchers did not need assistance from SpaceX to use the satellite signals, and they emphasized that they had no access to the actual data being sent through the satellites – only to information related to the satellite’s location and movement.

Foreign adversaries who cannot launch their own global navigation satellites might find this as a "poor man's" alternative.

Journal Reference:
Zaher Zak Kassas, Joe Khalife, Mohammad Neinavaie. The First Carrier Phase Tracking and Positioning Results with Starlink LEO Satellite Signals, IEEE (DOI: 10.1109/TAES.2021.3113880)

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

Russia arrests cybersecurity expert on treason charge:

The founder of one of Russia’s largest cybersecurity companies has been arrested on suspicion of state treason and will be held in a notorious prison run by the security services for the next two months, a Moscow court said on Wednesday.

The charges against Ilya Sachkov, founder of Group-IB, are classified and details of them were not immediately clear. State-run news agency Tass cited an anonymous source who said Sachkov denied passing on secret information to foreign intelligence services.

[...] Dmitry Peskov, president Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, told reporters on Wednesday that Sachkov’s arrest “had nothing to do with the business and investment climate in our country,” according to Interfax.

“He was in a grey area because of the industry he worked in. The secret services consider cybersecurity to be part of their territory. So either he crossed a line, or he crossed somebody’s interests,” said a person who has worked with Sachkov.

[...] In 2019, a court sentenced a former top FSB[*] cyber security official to 22 years on treason charges for passing information along to the US. A former senior executive at Kaspersky Lab, Russia’s top cyber security firm, was sentenced to 14 years in prison in the same case, details of which were not made public.

[*] Federal Security Service. Ever wonder how "Federal Security Service" is translated into "FSB" instead of "FSS"?

Wikipepida elaborates (emphasis added):

upstart writes:

Physicists may have cracked the case of “Zen” stones balanced on ice pedestals:

Visit the Small Sea of Lake Baikal in Russia during the winter and you'll likely see an unusual phenomenon: a flat rock balanced on a thin pedestal of ice, akin to stacking Zen stones common to Japanese gardens. The phenomenon is sometimes called a Baikal Zen formation. The typical explanation for how these formations occur is that the rock catches light (and heat) from the Sun and this melts the ice underneath until just a thin pedestal remains to support it. The water under the rock refreezes at night, and it's been suggested that wind may also be a factor.

Now, two French physicists believe they have solved the mystery of how these structures form, according to a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences—and their solution has nothing to do with the thermal conduction of the stone. Rather, they attribute the formation to a phenomenon known as sublimation, whereby snow or ice evaporates directly into vapor without passing through a water phase. Specifically, the shade provided by the stone hinders the sublimation rates of the surrounding ice in its vicinity, while the ice further away sublimates at a faster rate.

Many similar formations occur naturally in nature, such as hoodoos (tall, spindly structures that form over millions of years within sedimentary rock), mushroom rocks or rock pedestals (the base has been eroded by strong dusty winds), and glacier tables (a large stone sitting precariously on top of a narrow pedestal of ice). But the underlying mechanisms by which they form can be very different.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

Amazon’s indoor camera drone is ready to fly around your house

Next up: cameras. Amazon's crazy indoor, flying drone camera—the ambiguously named "Ring Always Home Cam"—is actually for sale now in the US. This was announced a full year ago, but now it's available "exclusively by invitation" for $249.99. This is a "Day 1 Edition" (read: a beta product). So Amazon isn't letting just anyone buy it. You can request an invitation to give Amazon money on the product page.

In case you've not had enough dystopian future products:
Amazon’s Astro Robot is Straight Out of the Jetsons

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

From: Techdirt

Content moderation is a can of worms. For Internet infrastructure intermediaries, it’s a can of worms that they are particularly poorly positioned to tackle. And yet Internet infrastructure elements are increasingly being called on to moderate content—content they may have very little insight into as it passes through their systems.

The vast majority of all content moderation happens on the “top” layer of the internet—such as social media and websites, places online that are the most visible to an average user. If a post violates a platform’s terms of service, the post is usually blocked or taken down. If a user continues to post content that violates a platform’s terms, then the user’s account is often suspended. These types of content moderation practices are increasingly understood by average Internet users.

Less often discussed or understood are the types of services facilitated via actors in the Internet ecosystem that both support and exist under the upper content layers of the Internet.

Many of these companies host content, supply cloud services, register domain names, provide web security, and many more features of what could be described as the plumbing services of the Internet. But instead of water and sewage, the Internet deals in digital information. In theory, these “infrastructure intermediaries” could moderate content, but for reasons of convention, legitimacy, and practicality they don’t usually do it on purpose.

However, some notable recent exemptions may be setting precedent.

Amazon Web Services removed Wikileaks from their system in 2010. Cloudflare kicked off the Daily Stormer. An Italian court ordered Cloudflare to remove a copyright infringing site. Amazon suspended hosting for Parler.

upstart writes:

Great ape's consonant and vowel-like sounds travel over distance without losing meaning:

Researchers from the University of Warwick's Department of Psychology set out to collect empirical data to investigate the model. They selected a range of sounds from previously collected audio recordings of orangutan communications. Specific consonant-like and vowel-like signals were played out and re-recorded across the rainforest at set distances of 25, 50, 75 and 100 meters. The quality and content of the signals received were analyzed.

[...] The team found that although the quality of the signal may have degraded, the content of the signal was still intact—even at long distance. In fact the informational characteristics of calls remained uncompromised until the signal became inaudible. This calls into question the existing and accepted theory of language development.

Dr. Adriano Lameira, an evolutionary psychologist from the University of Warwick, led the study. He said:

"We used our bank of audio data recordings from our studies of orangutan in Indonesia. We selected the clear vowel-like and consonant-like signals and played them out and re-recorded them over measured distances in a rainforest setting. The purpose of this study was to look at the signals themselves and understand how they behaved as a package of information. This study is neat because it is only across distance that you can hope to assess this error limit theory—it disregards other aspects of communication like gestures, postures, mannerisms and facial expressions.

"The results show that these signals seem to be impervious to distance when it comes to encoding information.

Journal Reference:
Adriano R. Lameira, António Alexandre, Marco Gamba, et al. Orangutan information broadcast via consonant-like and vowel-like calls breaches mathematical models of linguistic evolution, Biology Letters (DOI: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2021.0302)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Quantum computing hits the desktop, no cryo-cooling required:

Extreme vacuums, mu metals and microkelvin-temperature cryogenic cooling: this is not a recipe for affordable, portable or easily scalable quantum computing power. But an Australian-born startup says it has developed a quantum microprocessor that needs none of these things. Indeed, it runs happily at room temperature. Right now, it's the size of a rack unit. Soon, it'll be the size of a decent graphics card, and before too long it'll be small enough to fit in mobile devices alongside traditional processors.

If this company does what it says it can, you'll be able to integrate the advantages of quantum into computers of just about any size, freeing this powerful new technology from the constraints of supercomputer size and expense. Quantum software and calculations won't need to be done through a fast connection to a mainframe or the cloud, it'll be done on-site where it's needed. Pretty disruptive stuff.

Quantum Brilliance was founded in 2019 on the back of research undertaken by its founders at the Australian National University, where they developed techniques to manufacture, scale and control qubits embedded in synthetic diamond.

[...] This field itself is not new – indeed, room-temperature quantum qubits have been around experimentally for more than 20 years. Quantum Brilliance's contribution to the field is in working out how to manufacture these tiny things precisely and replicably, as well as in miniaturizing and integrating the control structures you need to get information in and out of the qubits – the two key areas that have held these devices back from scaling beyond a few qubits to date.

upstart writes:

70% of Millennials Are Living Paycheck to Paycheck: Survey:

Millennials' wallets are rather skimpy.

Seventy percent of the generation said they're living paycheck to paycheck, according to a survey by PYMNTS and LendingClub, which analyzed economic data and census-balanced surveys of over 28,000 Americans. It found that about 54% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, but millennials had the biggest broke energy.

By contrast, 40% of baby boomers and seniors said they live paycheck to paycheck, the least of any generation. Living paycheck to paycheck reflects economic needs and wants just as much, if not more than, incomes or wealth levels, according to the report. Age and family status also factor in greatly. This explains why millennials, who turn ages 25 to 40 this year, are struggling.

[...] It doesn't help that millennials have faced one economic challenge after another since the oldest of them graduated into the dismal job market of the 2008 financial crisis. A dozen years later, many are still grappling with the lingering effects of The Great Recession, struggling to build wealth while trying to afford soaring costs for things like housing and healthcare and shouldering the lion's share of America's student-loan debt.

The pandemic threw yet another wrench into their plans by giving them their second recession and second housing crisis before the age of 40. The report acknowledges that the pandemic played a major role in that stretched thin feeling.

[...] It seems, then, that it's a combination of external economic circumstances, a precarious life stage, and some spending habits that are leaving millennials feeling strapped for cash.

Original Submission